Theories of Personality Ch.9

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Anxiety

Sullivan asserted that the experience of anxiety has its origins in an infant's interpersonal experiences. A mother who is tense and fearful passes on those feelings to her vulnerable infant.

Apathy

A withdrawn "I don't care" orientation to an infant's experiences of unsatisfied needs such as hunger, thirst, and pain.

Bad-Me

A personification that is made up of those experiences that have been punished or diapproved of by the mother. It stems from unpleasant or embarrassing interpersonal relationships, and it contains those behaviors of which we are ashamed. This self-image is associated with feelings of anxiety.

Dynamism

Energy transformations that become habitual behavioral patterns of relating to others that characterize the individual thoughout life.

Empathic resonance

The capacity of an infant or child to feel the mother's feelings and vice versa.

Gradient of anxiety

A means of an infant's gauging the desirability of its various behaviors. the gradient of anxiety ranges from relatively mild tension-evoking behaviors to behaviors that elicit intense negative emotions.

Malevolent transformation

the development of a malevolent attitude toward others. This change in attitude can occur when children have been denied tenderness and affectionate care. They come to repress any need for tenderness and treat others with hostility and unfriendliness.

Not-Me

A personification that is made up of those inchoate and threatening aspects of ourselves, from which we dissociate and keep in the unconscious. This personification of self embodies all the unacceptable behaviors that are accompanied by "uncanny" feeling of anxiety.

One-genus postulate

The concept that "Everyone and anyone is much more simply human than otherwise, more like everyone else than different." Sullivan focused on the continuity of mental processes from normality through psychosis.

Parataxic mode

the perception of events in a temporal sequence, one after the other. the infant comes to expect an event by what immediately percedes or follows it.

Personality

A series of interpersonal dynamisms, habitual patterns of relating to others, originally designed to reduce anxiety and obtain satisfaction.

Personifications

Mental images we have of ourselves and other people. Also, conceptions of the self that are formed in the relationship with the mothering figure.

Protaxic mode

the simplest and crudest mode of experiencing reality at the beginning of life in which the infant's experience is limited to a constant stream of sensory events over which it cannot impose order or consistency

Schizophrenia

A variety of disorders characterized by bizarre, seemingly unconnected cognitive and verbal processes and often of psychotic proportions. Sullivan focused on psychological causation, whereas contemporary psychiatry emphasizes the biochemistry involved in this syndrome.

Selective inattention

A method of ignoring or rejecting stimuli, which serves to alleviate the influence of anxiety-provoking stimuli. This defense mechanism may lead to distortion of reality.

Self-system/self-dynamism

A cluster of security operations. It begins when the infant begins to develop a habitual pattern of behaviors in dealing with others, to minimize anxiety and to gain the greatest satisfaction.

Social accommodation

In Sullivan's view, the second of the two main factors leading to development during the juvenile years. It involves learning to accept and tolerate familial and social diversity through exposure to a variety of new and significant others.

Somnolent detachement

Literally, the separation from reality that occurs by being sleepy. From the infant's point of view, somnolent detachment involves not only a "don't care" attitude but also a forthright indifference to those who are seen as responsible for neglecting the infant's desires.

Syntaxic mode

Adult, logical, and analytical thought processes. The experience of reality in the syntaxic mode includes the ability to predict cause and effect.